Links for 22nd March 2010

"… of course, war is wrong; wars are fought for stupid reasons, or the wrong reasons, and a decent liberal humane person has to accept that it's better to wage peace, not war. <br />
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This admirable sentiment is fatal for the writer of Action SF; the war has to be vicious, and full of horror, and the violence has to escalate! More ass has to be kicked! (Which, you know, is kind of awful really; but as least we're not as morally murky as those evil bastards who write horror.)"

"What happens a lot now is that people graduate college and go work for some IT startup, and then they realize it's being bankrolled by the yakuza. The yakuza go, hey, this guy's smart. He earns money. We could use him. So they'll say to him: how would you like to become a member? We'll make you a corporate associate so you don't have to spend two years cleaning the office and answering the phone. It's employment for life! Because of the reputation of the yakuza, most people would be scared and hesitant to refuse. When you're privy to knowledge of how a large front company works, it's kind of hard to back out."

"Companies typically don't do bad things because they have bad people," said Kristina A. Diekmann, Ph.D.[…] "When people imagine or predict what they would do in certain situations, they think about what they should do, however, when it comes to actually making decisions, people tend to focus on what they want to do. They are not conditioned to think of the ethical consequences at the time of the decision," Diekmann went on to say. "What is particularly problematic is that when people deceive themselves into thinking they are ethical but don't act accordingly, it encourages the continuation of negative behavior."